By Emma,Sutherland Disley, Alex,Sussex, Jon,Pollard, Jack,Saunders, Catherine L.,Morley, Katherine I.,Gkousis, Evangelos,Hulme, Shann

This report presents an outcome evaluation of the National Model for Liaison and Diversion (L&D) in England, which aims to identify and support vulnerable individuals within the criminal justice system (CJS) by linking them with appropriate health and social care services. The evaluation utilizes a novel, large-scale linked dataset, combining healthcare and criminal justice records, to assess the impact of the National Model on health service utilization, re-offending rates, diversion from the CJS, and the timeliness of court processes. Findings suggest L&D services engage individuals with multiple vulnerabilities, intervene at crisis points, and may increase diversion from custodial sentences. However, the evaluation found no overall reduction in re-offending following L&D referral.

Santa Monica, CA: Cambridge, UK: RAND, 2021. 232p.

By Kelly Lyn Mitchell, Julia Laskorunsky, Ebony Ruhland, and Tammy Dean

Community supervision, commonly known as probation or parole, involves people serving part of their sentence under supervision while living in the community. Supervision conditions are requirements that individuals must comply with during this period, such as engaging in a treatment program, maintaining employment, or regularly checking in with their probation or parole officer. However, the current condition-setting approach often focuses on setting restrictions on behavior without providing meaningful guidance for behavioral change. This policy brief proposes aligning supervision conditions with the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) framework to improve outcomes for individuals on supervision and the community. 

Policy Brief, Minneapolis, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. 2023. 7p.

By Will Engelhardt and Daniel S. Lawrence

Before the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act was implemented in December 2019, North Carolina was the last state that still automatically charged 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in its criminal legal system. In March 2014, led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey, a group of stakeholders from Durham County, North Carolina, started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16- and 17-year-olds from entering the criminal legal system. The first of its kind in North Carolina, the program provides services including life skills courses, restorative justice efforts, and behavioral health treatment over a 90-day period and has expanded to include adults of all ages. It has also been replicated in certain counties throughout the state. The MDP enables law enforcement officers in Durham County to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor crime(s) to community-based services in lieu of charge, citation or arrest. The purpose is to diminish unnecessary arrests and jail time and the collateral consequences of being charged with and convicted of a crime. A central feature of this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers believe may have committed a crime will not be arrested or charged and will not formally enter the justice criminal legal system in any way. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted in-depth process and impact evaluations of the MDP, the findings of which we summarize in this report. By conducting both types of evaluations, the research team was able to better understand the processes and context that led to observed impacts. In addition, this is the first time a third-party research organization has evaluated the program’s impact, and such an evaluation is critical to demonstrating the program’s usefulness. Key takeaways from the process evaluation (A Process Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina) and the impact evaluation (An Impact Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina) are detailed in box 1.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 24p.

By Daniel S. Lawrence, Will Engelhardt, Storm Ervin, Rudy Perez

Before the implementation of the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act in December 2019, North Carolina was the last state that still automatically charged 16-to-17-year-olds as adults in its justice system. In March 2014, a group of stakeholders from Durham County—led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey—started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16-to-17-year-olds from entering the justice system. The program has since expanded to include adults up to 26 years old. The first program of its kind in North Carolina, the MDP gives law enforcement officers in Durham County the discretion to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor offense(s) to community-based services (such as life skills courses, restorative justice efforts, and behavioral health treatment) in lieu of citation or arrest. The purpose was to diminish unnecessary arrests and time in jail and the collateral consequences of being charged with and potentially convicted of a crime. What is particularly unique about this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers believe may have committed a crime will not be arrested or charged and will not formally enter the justice system in any way. This impact evaluation, the first conducted for the MDP, found that from March 2014 to February 2020, law enforcement officers in Durham County referred fewer than one-quarter of all people eligible for diversion to the MDP, though when they did, the program had positive impacts. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted an in-depth impact evaluation of the MDP, the findings of which are detailed in this report. This impact evaluation was one component of Urban’s research on the MDP; Urban also conducted a detailed process evaluation that was described in a July 2021 report, A Process Evaluation of the Misdemeanor Diversion Program in Durham County, North Carolina (Engelhardt et al. 2021). Key Takeaways The data examined in this report cover January 2012 to February 2020 and were collected from North Carolina’s Administrative Office of the Courts, the MDP, the Durham Police Department (DPD), and the Durham County Sheriff’s Office. Box 1 provides five key findings the research team derived from these data. In this report, we assess the following: ◼ MDP enrollment ◼ MDP completion rates ◼ the MDP’s impact on new arrests, convictions, and jail admissions for program participants ◼ the MDP’s impact on disparities by race and ethnicity, sex, and age ◼ the MDP’s impact on system-level arrests, convictions, and jail admissions Analyses were separated into two population groups—people ages 16 to 17 and people ages 18 to 21—because each group was eligible for the MDP during different periods. These groups were statistically matched to comparison groups through propensity score matching for the analyses that examined new arrests, convictions, and jail admissions. The comparison groups were well balanced with the MDP participant groups (see appendix D) and were pulled from pools of people who were concurrently eligible for the program but did not participate. Five Key Findings ◼ Approximately 77 percent of people eligible for the MDP were not referred to the program while it was operational from March 2014 to February 2020. ◼ Of those who did participate in the program, there was a very high completion rate of 95 percent. ◼ MDP participants had significantly lower rates of rearrests, convictions, or jail admissions than comparison groups within six months, one year, and two years. ◼ Participation in the MDP significantly reduced disparities in new arrests within two years and in new convictions and jail admissions within six months between 16-to-17-year-old Black people and non-Black people, making the differences in the levels of new arrests between these groups much more equivalent than between Black and non-Black people who did not participate in the MDP. ◼ The MDP did not have a larger impact on countywide rates of arrests, convictions, or jail admissions for either of the two age groups we analyzed

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 83p.

By Brittany C. Cunningham, Vincent Bauer, Kira Cincotta, Jessica Dockstader, Benjamin Carleton, Bridgette Bryson, Daniel S. Lawrence

Officer safety is of critical importance in an era of increased risk for law enforcement officers (hereinafter “officers”). Officers respond to some of the most unpredictable, traumatic, and violent encounters of any profession. Although much of an officer’s workday entails repetitive interactions, some calls for service or self-initiated contacts by officers may escalate into dangerous encounters. For officers to adequately mitigate the risks they may encounter while responding to calls for service, they must be well informed regarding the types of risks they face, the situations that may pose greater risk, and the strategies that will mitigate these risks.

Although previous empirical work on officer safety has yielded many important insights, to our knowledge, no prior work has applied machine learning models to produce risk assessments to promote officer safety. This project explored the potential for machine learning to identify high-risk incidents to officers using only the information available to dispatchers. A risk assessment model that could successfully flag high-risk incidents at dispatch would be immensely useful to law enforcement agencies, making it possible for officers to be better informed about potential risk factors before arriving on scene. Such a model would also be useful to agencies as they decide how to allocate scarce resources, such as deciding which calls should receive single- or dual-officer vehicles, where to send alternative response teams, and whether to deploy specialized units.

Readers should be aware that the model reflects the data upon which it is built. Biases in reporting and collecting officer injuries, as well as in how officers respond to calls for service, will be mirrored in the model’s risk assessments. While we have gone to great lengths to build the model using objective factors, these biases could sometimes lead the model to identify a situation as high risk when in fact that situation reflects low risk to officers. Concerns about the potential for bias in machine learning are important to evaluate, and these techniques offer opportunities for objective empirical examination of divisive topics to minimize the bias that is already present in the real world.

Calls for service and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data were merged from each of the four agencies, revealing the following findings:

Overall, the machine learning model performed well, correctly identifying officer injuries about half of the time. Given the rarity of officer injuries within the four agencies, being able to identify half of such rare situations is notable.

The model was also able to identify the factors that were the most important in predicting risk to officer safety and the types of incidents that posed the highest risk to officer safety. The results demonstrate that such a model can identify officer injuries from data on call characteristics; thus, whether such a model could be built into the dispatch process should be explored so that officers would be informed about potential risk factors before arriving at the location of a call.

The model highlighted factors and calls for service types that posed greater risks to officer safety.

The results of the machine learning model, along with the results from the officer interviews and surveys, also highlighted an often-overlooked aspect of police operations that is critically important to officer safety: dispatch.

Beyond producing statistical models, this project also collaborated with participating agencies to explore officer perspectives on safety and identify promising practices and recommendations to reduce risks to officers.

This project provides several practical benefits for improving officer safety. These benefits include the following:

Quantifying concepts that until now have been only informally or qualitatively understood (e.g., the relative risks of different calls for service types).

Comparing officer perceptions about injury risk to the quantitative data and identifying where gaps in understanding exist.

Highlighting the important relationship between dispatch and patrol, as well as the implications that this relationship has for officer safety.

Helping agencies assess the efficacy of their trainings and policies that directly affect officer safety.

Providing guidance on the information agencies collect and make available to dispatchers.

Supporting agencies to improve the amount and quality of risk and injury data agencies collect and use.

We hope that by providing agencies with a foundational knowledge of risks to officer safety, agencies will have a basis for modifying policy, training, and operations, leading to the implementation of strategies, processes, and procedures to keep officers and the communities they serve safe.

Arlington, VA: CNA Corporation, 2024. 52p.

By Daniel S. Lawrence, Bryce E. Peterson, Rochisha Shukla, and Lilly Robin

This publication represents a technical summary report of the Urban Institute’s evaluation of efforts with the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) to improve its public surveillance network. The goal of this study was to conduct a rigorous process, impact, and cost effectiveness evaluation of the process MPD took to optimize its network, which included improving operations, installing new cameras, and integrating video analytic technologies into its system. The two video analytic technologies were (1) automatic license plate recognition cameras and (2) high-definition cameras connected to gunshot detection technology. The evaluation used a mixed-methods research design. Qualitative data collection included in-depth observations of the department’s camera operations to understand their practices and determine which types of improvements would most benefit the program, as well as stakeholder interviews with staff members who either worked directly within the camera program or routinely used its footage in their work. We conducted interviews with camera operators, camera program supervisors, shift commanders, crash reconstruction unit officers, specialized investigations division officers, criminal investigations bureau detectives, and civilian managers from the department’s communication division. We also collected numerous quantitative data, including administrative crime data, metadata from the camera system, and systematic data on the costs associated with the system upgrades. We then used these data to assess: (1) the overall impact all of the interventions had on crime at the city, focus area, and intersection levels; (2) the specific impact of the two video analytic components on crime; and (3) the costs of the upgrades relative to their effectiveness. Our findings indicate that the impact of these interventions was mixed. We analyzed data in the two areas where MPD concentrated their surveillance optimization efforts and found some decreases in crime. However, when we focused on our analyses on the specific intersections where cameras and other technologies were installed, our models found increases in some criminal events, which is likely the result of the new cameras capturing crimes that may have otherwise been missed by the department. We also found no significant changes in crime in the areas where the two video analytic technologies were implemented compared to matched comparison areas. The findings from this research yielded several important lessons for improving criminal justice policy and practices. First, police departments must have strong, collaborative relationships with the vendors they select to upgrade their surveillance systems. Second, agencies that engage in efforts to optimize their surveillance systems should regularly re-evaluate their goals and processes to maximize the effectiveness of these new technologies. Finally, departments should ensure that all necessary personnel are made aware of the new technologies and have adequate access to them.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2024. 18p.

By Will Engelhardt. Storm Ervin, Daniel S. Lawrence, and Rudy Perez

Before its Raise the Age legislation in December 2019, North Carolina was one of the few states that still automatically charged 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in its justice system. In 2013, led by then–chief district court judge Marcia Morey, a group of stakeholders from Durham County, North Carolina, started the Misdemeanor Diversion Program (MDP) to prevent 16- and 17-year-olds from entering the justice system. The first of its kind in North Carolina, the program began in March 2014 and expanded over time to include people of all ages. It has also been replicated in certain counties throughout the state. The MDP allows law enforcement officers in Durham County to redirect people accused of committing their first misdemeanor crime(s) to community-based services in lieu of citation or arrest. The purpose is to diminish unnecessary arrests and time in jail, and the collateral consequences associated with being charged with and potentially convicted of a crime. What is particularly unique about this program is that it occurs prearrest and precharge, meaning someone law enforcement officers may believe has committed a crime is not arrested or charged and does not formally enter the justice system in any way. In 2020 and 2021, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Research Consortium, the Urban Institute conducted an in-depth process evaluation of the MDP, the findings of which are detailed in this report. This process evaluation was one component of Urban’s research on the MDP; the research team is also conducting an outcome evaluation that will be described in a fall 2021 report.

Safely and Justice Challenge, 2021. 44p.

By: Michelle Kirby

A 2010 law established a pilot program to allow Connecticut courts to order GPS devices (ankle bracelets) to be used to track family violence offenders. Under this law, the Judicial Branch’s Court Support Services Division (CSSD) implemented the Alert Notification/GPS program in the Bridgeport, Danielson, and Hartford judicial districts. CSSD’s preliminary report on the program indicated that it met its objective to (1) enhance monitoring of high-risk family violence offenders and (2) increase victim safety. The December 2011 final summary report concluded that the program was successfully implemented in all three court locations with a high degree of collaboration systemwide.

Hartford: Connecticut General Assembly Office of Legislative Research, 2023. 4p.

By  Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin

This Article examines the effect of state laws restricting the use of police quotas. Police quotas describe the establishment of a predetermined number of traffic stops, citations, or arrests that officers must make within a particular time period. Some police supervisors have historically used quotas to ensure adequate productivity by officers. However, critics argue that quotas incentivize officers to engage in unnecessary, and in some cases, unconstitutional, coercive behavior. Numerous states across the country have enacted laws banning or limiting the use of police quotas.

This Article analyzes a dataset of traffic and pedestrian stops from eleven law enforcement agencies with varied laws on police quotas over time. It finds minimal evidence that laws limiting police quotas reduce coercive behavior by police. If anything, agencies may engage in slightly more coercive behavior after the introduction of these laws. However, we find evidence that restrictions on the use of police quotas may improve the quality of traffic stops and vehicle searches.

We offer several hypotheses to explain these results. First, the narrow focus of quota laws may limit their effectiveness. Second, the managerial tactics that replace police quotas may incentivize officers to engage in similar amounts of coercive behavior. And third, the relatively weak enforcement mechanisms in state quota bans may reduce their deterrent effect.

We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the literature on police regulation. We also offer recommendations for reforming police quota laws.

109 Iowa Law Review 2127 (2024), 

By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin

The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy development. The law enforcement lobby operates largely without coordinated opposition, resulting in capture of criminal justice policymaking and skewed policy outcomes that often institutionalize injustice and subordination. The strength of the law enforcement lobby also presents a challenge to the growing defunding and abolition movements. Nevertheless, the law enforcement lobby remains at the periphery of contemporary scholarly conversations about the democratization and design of criminal justice institutions.

This Article describes and evaluates the influence of the law enforcement lobby on criminal justice policy. It argues that the law enforcement lobby raises unique problems that extend beyond traditional lobbying concerns, including the ability to influence life and liberty, the power to perpetuate racial subordination, and a pervasive power over the operation of democratic institutions.

Drawing on the growing calls for democratization and power-shifting in the criminal justice system, this Article offers a range of recommendations to curtail the strength of the law enforcement lobby. First, the Article argues for reforms that “level up” of the power of competing interests that can counter the power of the law enforcement lobby in criminal justice policymaking. In doing so, the Article focuses specifically on reforms that imbed contestation in policymaking by communities most impacted by the criminal justice system. Second, the Article concurrently proposes mechanisms to “level down” the power of the law enforcement lobby, including realistic restrictions on the lobbying capacity of law enforcement interest groups that draws on First Amendment Speech Clause doctrine that permits restriction of public employee speech. Taken together, these reforms could facilitate broader transformation of the American criminal justice system.

107 Minnesota Law Review 1965 (2023), 73p.

By Barry Friedman, Rachel Harmon & Farhang Heydari

For far too long, the federal government has failed to exercise its constitutional authority to mitigate the harms imposed by local policing. Absent federal intervention, though, some harmful aspects of policing will not be addressed effectively, or at all. States and localities often lack the necessary capacity and expertise to change policing, and many states and localities lack the will. This Article argues for federal intervention and describes what that intervention should look like. The Article begins by describing three paradigmatic areas of local policing that require federal intervention to create real change: excessive use of force, racial discrimination, and the unregulated use of surveillance technologies. Because state and local governments are either unable or unwilling to address these problems alone, the federal government should intervene to identify and enforce minimum standards, develop best practices, collect data, and distribute resources nationwide. Regrettably, Congress has failed to act adequately to improve local policing for the better, although it has tried to encourage reform through the use of its Spending Power. This Article argues that Congress should utilize its regulatory powers under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause to address these paradigmatic problem areas, and it explains how this can be done consistently with Supreme Court doctrine. Alongside—or in the absence of—congressional action, the executive branch has the power and responsibility to act to address policing’s harms. The Article explains that, though indirect, the President wields considerable power to influence policing by setting policy, implementing federal programs, enforcing civil rights, and supervising federal law enforcement. Although the executive branch should use this power to promote local policing that is effective, fair, and accountable, and that minimizes harm, administration after administration has failed to do so consistently and also has failed to hold federal law enforcement to these standards. Recent executive branch efforts have improved the situation, but there still exists a gaping chasm between how the federal government should be influencing local policing and how it is doing so today

109 Virginia Law Review 1527 (December, 2023), 101p.

By Anne McNamara

During the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio crafted the policing power to stop and search an individual without a warrant, without probable cause, and if the officer possesses a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Thirty years later, in Whren v. United States, the Court willfully blinded itself to the subjective motivations of an officer who initiate a Terry stop, requiring only a claim of some lawful reason to initiate a stop to adhere to the Fourth Amendments protections. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence disparately affects Black people, the Court continuously asserts that the Equal Protection Clause (EPC)—not the Fourth Amendment—is the proper constitutional avenue for relief from race-motivated policing. Even a defendant who successfully overcomes the EPC’s practically insurmountable requirement of proving discriminatory intent is not afforded the exclusionary rule’s protection. Ultimately, the Court’s use of EPC as its suggested remedy provides little concrete relief for individuals subjected to pretextual stops. Against this backdrop of racially influenced law enforcement, the advent and development of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has fundamentally altered American policing over the past decade. FRT is an algorithmic code, created by private companies, capable of recognizing a person’s facial identity by comparing it to other faces that are located in a centralized database. Some critics of the police’s use of FRT warn of its disparate impact on people of color who already face higher instances of police surveillance. Further, critics caution that FRT algorithms have higher error rates in identifying people of color, that databases used are often overly saturated with people of color, and that the police’s unregulated, unrestrained use of FRT reinforces preconceived notions of “Black criminality.” Historically, federal courts have been reluctant to condemn police implementation of technological advances as violative of the Fourth Amendment. While the police are prohibited from using publicly unavailable technology to surveil the details of an individual’s home, technology deployed by law enforcement in a public space often escapes constitutional constraints. In some instances, however, defendants successfully challenge police use of advanced technology for surveillance purposes through the lens of mosaic theory, which assesses police behavior in the aggregate to determine whether prolonged periods of surveillance constitutes an invasion of privacy impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. In light of the Court’s silence regarding FRT, a handful of cities and states have enacted laws that curb or completely ban police use of FRT. On the federal level, the preceding Congress proposed two bills: one seeking to require probable cause for police to deploy the technology, the other seeking to implement a complete federal ban of FRT and to disincentivize state and local use by withholding certain funding. This Note first surveys the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that created a legal justice system that is willfully ignorant of an officer’s potential racial motivations.18 Then, this Note discusses the police’s implementation of FRT and how it further infringes upon Black people’s liberties and dignities under the guise of “neutral” technology. Next, this Note explores the Court’s reasoning in evolving technology and surveillances cases—with a particular emphasis on mosaic theory—and discusses state and proposed federal statutory approaches to FRT regulation. Then, this Note argues that the most dangerous uses of FRT are the least likely to be recognized and curbed by the Supreme Court due to its longstanding refusal to allow the constitution to check unrestrained police behavior, leaving Black people defenseless against FRT’s role in increasing the structural inequalities embedded in our legal system. This Note concludes by calling for a comprehensive federal ban on police use of FRT that adequately incentivizes state and local law enforcement to enact similar bans.

SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. LVI:731 , 26p.

B/y Griffin Edwards and

Stephen Rushin

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. But some scholars and civil rights activists worried that by giving police officers wider discretion to search vehicles incident to arrest, the Belton rule may have led to unjustified civil rights violations and racial profiling.

This Article argues that, by limiting vehicle searches incident to arrest, Gant may have disincentivized policing tactics that disproportionately target individuals of color without jeopardizing officer safety.

By utilizing a data set of traffic stops from thirteen law enforcement agencies in seven states, this Article presents an empirical study of the effects of shifting doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest. This Article makes two findings. First, it finds no evidence that Gant endangered officer safety. Changes in state doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest are not associated with increases in assaults of officers during traffic stops. Second, it hypothesizes that Gant may have reduced racial profiling. Gant may be linked to a somewhat larger decline in vehicle searches incident to arrest for nonwhite individuals relative to white individuals.

These findings are a reminder that seemingly neutral procedural choices by courts in regulating police behavior may have racially disparate effects. We conclude by arguing for the narrowing of the discretionary authority of police officers as a mechanism for reducing disparities in the criminal justice system.

91 Fordham L. Rev. 1 (2022).

By Brian A. Jackson, Pauline Moore, Jennifer T. Leschitz, Benjamin Boudreaux, Jo Caulkins, Shoshana R. Shelton

Violence by K–12 students is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent such incidents is becoming increasingly important. Various concerning behaviors or disturbing communications, including direct threats, can precede acts of violence. Although removing every student exhibiting such behaviors might seem prudent, doing so can be counterproductive, limiting the effectiveness of safety efforts. With effective systems for behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM), schools can assess and respond to concerning behavior to protect the community and respond to the student whose behavior caused concern.

To do so, schools need the tools to respond. Tools may include restrictive measures or law enforcement involvement in the most serious cases, but other options can be more effective. Those additional options include different types of mental health intervention, counseling, and other supports. Teams with extensive tools available to them can better customize interventions, increasing the chance of positive outcomes for all involved.

In this report, the authors draw on published literature and extensive interviews with education and public safety practitioners to build an inventory of the many intervention options that are valuable for schools in the management phase of BTAM. In addition, drawing on varied approaches from the fields of counseling, school discipline and behavioral management, and other professions that must match appropriate services to the needs of youth in their care, the report discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement this critical part of efforts in preventing targeted violence and keeping school communities safe.

Key Findings

Various Intervention Options Are Available for K–12 BTAM Efforts

Support-focused interventions can address the underlying causes of problematic student behavior and also lead a student toward a more favorable, positive path into the future.

By using supportive counseling and other interventions, BTAM is widening the options available for school leaders and staff to address problematic behavior that has the potential to develop into violence.

To be effective, school BTAM teams need a broad set of tools, including options appropriately matched (1) to the specifics of a student's problematic behaviors, (2) to the unique school community and environment, and (3) to the needs and circumstances of the student or students involved.

Insights from Education, Public Safety, and Other Fields Can Be Combined to Support Matching Effective Interventions to Student Needs

Decision support tools and resource-matching guidance can help ensure that school-based teams are collecting the information required to taking a holistic approach to address a student's varied needs and help promote appropriate consistency to ensure that disparities in how BTAM teams respond do not substantiate concerns that BTAM processes are unfair or inequitable.

Using structured systems to capture data when a BTAM team (1) interviews students involved in an incident, (2) collects school or law enforcement data, or (3) contacts others for information about a student of concern provides a more straightforward starting point for selecting among multiple intervention options.

Recommendations

To better inform intervention planning, intervention tools should be designed so that they prioritize collecting data on factors that can be changed because pieces of information in BTAM that may be a useful part of assessing the danger posed by an individual may be useless for intervention planning.

The inventory of intervention options developed in this study could provide a starting point for schools to make conscious decisions as they (1) review the options available to their teams and (2) identify any options they do not have access to but that could become valuable near-term priorities to strengthen their school safety efforts.

Progress monitoring data of BTAM efforts can help better support students while also helping schools become more responsive to external oversight of their BTAM programs and allay concerns about the fairness and equity of outcomes across different student populations.

Including positive mileposts into threat management planning not only could help lay out a path to full completion of all intervention activities but could also help define goals more specifically for an at-risk student, motivating even more beneficial outcomes.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2025. 170p.

By David J. Knight and Vesla M. Weaver

This review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2025. 8:25–52

By Stephen Rushin

This Article argues that, if effectively regulated, policing represents a fundamentally important social institution that advances the community interest in public safety, justice, equality, and the rule of law.

In recent years, a significant and growing body of legal scholarship has called for the shrinking of police responsibilities, the defunding of police budgets, or the complete abolition of local police departments. A countervailing body of scholarly literature has questioned the wisdom of some of these proposals, arguing that they could unintentionally make policing worse or have unintended public safety effects.

This Article enters this debate by affirmatively defending the importance of the institution of policing. It argues that effectively regulated policing is critical to the investigation of harmful criminal behavior, the responses to public safety emergencies, the deterrence of future harmful conduct, the physical protection of historically marginalized communities, and the rule of law.

However, policing can only serve these important functions if it is effectively regulated and accountable to the community it serves. Too often, the failure of policymakers to properly regulate police behavior has led to unaccountable policing agencies that regularly violate the constitutional rights of their constituents, particularly the rights of historically marginalized populations. However, that represents an ongoing regulatory challenge rather than an indictment of the fundamental importance of the institution of policing.

Understanding the importance of policing as a social institution has more than mere academic significance. As some scholars push for a fundamental reimagination of public safety, it is vital for these proposals to understand the value conferred by the institution of policing. Only by understanding the importance of policing can both abolitionists and reformers develop solutions that balance public safety and the protection of constitutional rights.

76 South Carolina Law Review 133 (2024), 47p.

By Jeannine Bell and Stephen Rushin

This Article considers how policymakers can more effectively constrain police authority during traffic stops to reduce racial disparities and prevent unnecessary violence.

We begin by chronicling the power granted to police officers during traffic enforcement and the harms generated by this discretionary power. Under existing criminal procedure, police officers have considerable authority to stop motorists for any technical violation of the traffic code, even if the stated justification is a pretext for investigating an unrelated hunch or suspicion. After stopping a motorist, existing doctrine gives police the ability to question motorists, search vehicles under numerous circumstances, arrest drivers for minor violations of the law, and otherwise use traffic stops as a justification for criminal fishing expeditions. This makes police traffic stops an entryway into officer misconduct and violence.

Moreover, the harms of police traffic enforcement are felt disproportionately by communities of color. Empirical evidence generally suggests that Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely than their white counterparts to experience traffic stops. Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be stopped during daylight hours relative to nighttime hours when their race is apparent to police through visual observation. And searches of Black and Hispanic motorists are less likely to produce contraband than searches of white drivers, suggesting that police may employ a less rigorous standard of probable cause when justifying vehicle searches of drivers of color.

Given the growing body of literature on the harms caused by police traffic enforcement, some have called for the abolition of police traffic enforcement. Short of abolition, though, this Article shows how jurisdictions across the country have already moved to limit the authority of police during traffic encounters. This approach does not seek to eliminate entirely the police from the enforcement of traffic laws. Rather, it involves state and local policymakers enacting restrictions on police power during traffic enforcement that go beyond those mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court under existing doctrine. Indeed, in recent years, states and municipalities have enacted limitations on the use of pretextual traffic stops, consent searches, and unrelated questioning of motorists after stops. Others have restricted or banned the use of quotas as a police management tool. Some prosecutors’ offices have announced declination policies designed to disincentivize police from using traffic stops as a tool for the investigation of other unrelated crimes. Still other jurisdictions have explored additional reporting requirements and even technological replacements for the use of police officers in the enforcement of the traffic code.

Combined, we argue that this sort of criminal justice minimalism can reduce the harmful and racially disparate effects of police traffic enforcement without compromising public safety

57 Arizona State Law Journal, 2025, 52p.

By The College of Policing (UK)

The government’s Safer Streets mission aims to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and the wider criminal justice system. This guide supports senior police leaders and police and crime commissioners to help achieve this mission. It clearly sets out the best available evidence on public confidence in the police, as well as the policing activities that are most likely to have an impact. „ Implementing neighbourhood policing – Having a targeted visible presence in crime and anti-social behaviour hot spots or places with low trust. – Community engagement to identify the crime and anti-social behaviour issues that matter to people locally. – Carrying out effective problem-solving to tackle the issues that matter the most to local people. „ Policing with procedural and distributive justice – Making fair decisions and treating people respectfully. – Not being seen to over-police and under-protect communities. „ Improving police contact with victims – Responding to the needs and concerns of victims. – Focusing as much on the process as the end result. „ Improving police contact with suspects – Minimising the number of negative experiences. – Explaining enforcement action and preserving people’s dignity. „ Tackling police wrongdoing – Working within the law and adhering to ethical and professional standards. The guide begins by providing key definitions and trends in public perceptions over the past 20 years. It ends with a summary of what else may be important to public confidence in the police.

Coventry, UK: College of Policing Limited (2025) 23p.

By

Sarah Charman

,

Jemma Tyson

Record numbers of police officers are voluntarily resigning in England and Wales yet there is a lack of research which analyses why. Findings from an analysis of 62 interviews with police leavers who voluntarily resigned from the police service within England and Wales between January 2021 and June 2022 suggest that officers are leaving primarily due to perceptions of organizational injustice which focus upon: a lack of voice; concerns about promotion/progression; poor leadership; and a lack of organizational flexibility. This paper takes this latter reason—organizational flexibility—as its focus and through an inductive analysis of these leavers’ voices, aims to both enrich the scarce qualitative academic literature on police workforce resignations and retention but also to offer significant evidence for future consideration of workforce optimization. The findings indicate that although sympathetic to operational policing complexities, participants were frustrated by organizational inflexibility. Three key areas were identified where the police service was perceived to be unsupportive or unreceptive—(a) dealing with additional needs, disabilities, or health issues of officers, (b) conflicts with non-work commitments, primarily those associated with childcare/parental responsibilities, and (c) supporting officers transitioning to part-time working. These structural barriers to effective workplace functioning were exacerbated by the cultural norms of overwork and ‘fitting in’ and were additionally particularly experienced by female resigners. The authors call for a challenge to the cultural barriers towards flexible working, the modelling of flexible working at all levels of the organization, and a focus on reciprocal flexibility between employer and employee. Until this issue can be tackled, it is argued that retention will continue to be an underestimated but significant site of inequality within policing.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, paad104,

By Jacqueline M Drew, Elise Sargeant, Sherri Martin

Policing worldwide is facing a staffing and retention crisis. If the staffing exodus continues, communities will be left with too few police and large cohorts of inexperienced new recruits on the job. Drawing on 2,669 survey responses collected as part of a national study of law enforcement officers across the USA, we test an integrated theoretical model of the predictors of turnover intentions. We computed a path model using structural equation modelling, finding that job demand stressors (including trauma, organizational, and operational stressors), burnout, psychological distress, and commitment (including organizational commitment and occupational commitment) all play important roles in explaining the intentions of officers to exit the policing profession. Based on the study findings, the importance of trauma, organizational and operational job demand stress, and the differential impact of organizational and occupational commitment on police turnover intentions is established. Addressing burnout and psychological distress through a wellness agenda is likely to assist in stemming the outflow of officers from policing. The current study makes a significant empirical and practical contribution to the small body of existing police turnover research. The current research guides police leaders on the critical factors that must be considered when developing strategies and initiatives that aim to positively impact on the retention of officers within policing.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, paae036,